In the Brexit referendum of 2016, 73 percent of people aged between 18 and 24 voted to Remain in the European Union, compared with just 40 percent of people aged over 65. In fact, the propensity to have voted Leave increases with age, with the three oldest age groups here voting leave and the three youngest voting to Remain. Overall, 17.4 million people voted to Leave the European Union in 2016, compared with 16.1 million who voted Remain, or 51.9 percent of the vote to 48.1 percent.

As of June 2025, most young Britons thought that leaving the EU was the wrong decision, with ***percent of 18 to 24 year-old's and ** percent of 25 and 49 year-old's regretting the decision. By contrast, ** percent of those aged 65 or over thought that Brexit was the right decision.

In the Brexit referendum that took place in the United Kingdom on June 23, 2016, approximately 55 percent of men voted to leave the European Union, compared with 49 percent of women. The referendum itself was won by the leave side, after they won 51.9 percent of the vote in total. Overall, 33.56 million people voted in the referendum, of which 17.4 million people voted to Leave, and 16.1 million to Remain, a difference of around 1.27 million votes. Is support for Brexit falling in 2025? Recent surveys on Brexit suggest that an increasing number of Britons regret Brexit. The share of people of who think that Brexit was the wrong decision has increased from 43 percent in April 2021 to 55 percent as of January 2025, while support for leaving the EU fell from 46 percent to 30 percent. At the same time, evidence suggests that other issues have become much more of a priority for voters. In early 2025, the UK leaving the EU was behind several other major issues in the UK, such as the economy, the NHS, and immigration. Furthermore, people in the UK are still divided over what exact relationship they would like with the EU, with only 31 percent committed to full membership as of late 2023. Younger voters backed Remain According to exit polls on the day of the referendum, almost three quarters of British people aged between 18 and 24 voted to remain in the European Union. By contrast, leave was backed by a majority of people who were over the age of 45, with those aged over 65 the most likely age group to vote to leave. Among those aged 18 to 24 in 2025, who were too young to vote in the actual referendum, just ten percent thought leaving the EU was the right decision, compared with 17 percent of 25 to 49-year-olds, 38 percent of 50 to 64-year-olds, and 55 percent of those aged 65 or over.

The graph shows the voting intention of a sample of British voters when asked about their opinion on whether or not the United Kingdom (UK) should exit the EU. The results are split by age group. On the day of the referendum, **% of people between the ages of ** and ** wanted the UK to remain as a member of the European Union.

In the Brexit referendum of 2016, almost three quarters of people who lived in Edinburgh voted to remain in the European Union. Several other major cities also had a majority of remain voters, including the English cities of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds. In the UK’s second-largest city, Birmingham, a slight majority of people voted to leave the European Union. Across the whole of the United Kingdom, the leave side was victorious after winning the votes of 17.4 million people. Perceptions on Brexit in 2025 Since the UK left the EU in 2020, the share of people who regret Brexit has been steadily increasing. As of January 2025, 55 percent of people in Great Britain thought that Brexit was the wrong decision, compared with 30 percent who still supported the decision. Furthermore, a survey from the same month suggested that people thought Brexit had reaped few benefits. Approximately 67 percent of those surveyed thought that it had negatively impacted the cost of living, and 65 percent believing it had diminished the UK economy as a whole. By contrast, the main positive impact of Brexit was seen as the UK's control over its own laws. Demographics of Brexit voters Although several major English cities supported the UK remaining in the EU, every English region, with the exception of Greater London, voted for Brexit. While Wales also supported leave, both Scotland and Northern Ireland had a majority who supported remain. There were also noticeable divisions across age groups, with younger voters typically more likely to vote against Brexit, compared with older ones who supported it. Almost three-quarter of 18 to 24-year-olds voted Remain, compared with 60 percent of those aged 65 or over who backed Leave.

A recurrent criticism concerning the use of online social media data in political science research is the lack of demographic information about social media users. By employing a face-recognition algorithm to the profile pictures of Facebook users, the paper derives two fundamental demographic characteristics (age and gender) of a sample of Facebook users who interacted with the most relevant British parties in the two weeks before the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016. The article achieves the goals of (i) testing the precision of the algorithm, (ii) testing its validity, (iii) inferring new evidence on digital mobilisation, and (iv) tracing the path for future developments and application of the algorithm. The findings show that the algorithm is reliable and that it can be fruitfully used in political and social sciences both to confirm the validity of survey data and to obtain information from populations that are generally unavailable within traditional surveys.

This dataset is the result of an original survey designed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from National Universtity of Distance Education (UNED), University of Zaragoza, University of Córdoba and University of Valencia.

The goal of the survey was to better understand the relationship between populist attitudes and relevant socio-political and psychology items and indexes. The UK was selected as case study given the lack of similar studies in this country and the relevance of the data to better understand the political context that had been heavily impacted by the Brexit referendum and proces of separation from the European Union.

The survey was theoretically informed and included among others:

• Populism, Elitism and Pluralism items by Akkerman et al. (2014) (14 items)
• New items design for a new Multidimensional Scale of Populist Attitudes (37 items) (Olivas Osuna 2021; Olivas Osuna et al. 2024; Olivas Osuna et al. forthcoming)
• Conspiracy Beliefs items (8 items) (Bruder et al. 2013; Brotherton et al. 2013)
• Social alienation index (6 items) (Bélanger et al. 2019)
• Justification of violence index (6 items) (Bélanger et al. 2019)
• Radicalised network (3 items)(Moyano 2011)
• Meaning in life (presence and search)(4 items)(Steger et al. 2006)
• Bordering attitudes (6 items)(Olivas Osuna et al. forthcoming)
• Endorsement for political parties
• Items reflecting level of agreement with the main slogans and arguments used by British Eurosceptics (11 items)
• Items on satisfaction with democracy and importance of democracy and with illiberal views (ESS)
• Left-right ideological self-placement
• Socio-demographic variables (age, religion, education, etc.)

Fieldwork was conducted between 17 November and 4 December 2020. Participants were recruited following socio-demographic representativity criteria via the online platform Prolific. Survey were collected via Google Forms (Survey title: Political and social views in the UK).

Files uploaded include:

• Total responses received (N=849) (.xlsx file)
• Responses analysed once participants failing attention checks were eliminated from the sample (N=748) (.csv file)
• Survery questionnair (.pdf file)

Brexit marked a turning point in EU history. For the first time an EU member state left the EU, leading to concerns about the stability of the EU as a whole. Indeed, Brexit carried significant spillover effects in the other EU member states, both in terms of the loss of cooperation gains that disintegration entails, and for the risks of political contagion. To understand whether and how such spillover effects materialized during the Brexit withdrawal negotiations, we repeatedly fielded an EU-wide, six-wave cross-sectional survey in 6-month intervals between July 2017 and December 2019. The survey includes information on public opinion across 28 EU Member States including questions probing respondents’ attitudes towards the EU, perceptions of the Brexit process, as well as general political attitudes and demographic characteristics. The identities of all participants are anonymized. The final data includes weights based on language region, age, gender and party affinity in order to ensure representativeness. The data were collected by placing questions on an EU-wide online survey omnibus (the “EuroPulse”) that was regularly conducted by Dalia Research. In each wave, the sample consists of a census representative sample of approximately 10’000 working- age respondents (aged 18–69) from all EU member states, with sample sizes roughly proportional to their population size. While the overall sample is representative of the EU population, samples from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the UK are also nationally representative.

This dataset comes from the Living Brexit in Rural Britain project, funded by the Leverhulme trust and conducted from 2023 to 2025 collaboratively by the Universities of Sheffield, Aberystwyth, and Glasgow. This research tries to understand how Brexit continues to shape rural Britain, exploring the intersection of Brexit politics with broader social, economic, and demographic shifts.

This project examined Brexit as an ongoing, multi-layered process, existing alongside other contemporary challenges and trends such as the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-of-living crisis, changing migration trends, and global geopolitical shifts. Research was conducted in three anonymised rural market towns across England (Bonnington), Scotland (Glenforge), and Wales (Bryngwyn), selected to reflect regional diversity and varying Brexit referendum voting patterns.

Data collection involved a variety of qualitative methods, including 40 one-to-one interviews with rural policy actors, such as local politicians, agricultural sector representatives, business leaders, religious leaders, and community figures, and 15 focus groups with 58 residents in total. These residents were diverse in terms of age (mid 20s to mid 70s), length of residency, migration backgrounds, and national origins, from lifelong residents to recent international migrants. Additionally, biographical timelines of resident's personal histories were created during focus groups. Observational data were also collected through participant-observation conducted by research associates.

Research found marked participant discussions surrounding rural economic and labour market changes, shifting migration patterns post-Brexit, community cohesion and division, rural depopulation, and the relationship between local and national identities. Project findings highlighted the pronounced impact of Brexit on rural economic sectors reliant on international labour, such as agriculture, hospitality, and social care. Participants noted significant demographic changes, including declining EU migration, increasing global migration, and aging, declining rural populations. Brexit's polarising legacy emerged as a continued source of community tension, particularly pronounced in the English case study town, although mitigated by a strong sense of rural community interdependence and cohesion.Rural areas are experiencing dramatic social and economic change. For example, they have become significant sites of international labour migration and, increasingly, asylum seeker and refugee settlement leading to more ethnically diverse rural populations. Our project aims to develop understandings of how Brexit politics and policies interact with wider social, economic and demographic rural changes and affect everyday social life.

While there were variations in how rural regions voted in the 2016 Brexit Referendum, there was nevertheless a higher Leave vote in rural areas compared to the national average. This suggests a relationship between rural areas and Brexit agendas as well as highlighting why it is important to understand rural contexts and the social and economic changes being experienced within them.

It is nine years since the referendum and four years since the UK left the EU and our project examines what Brexit means for rural areas now and for the way in which rural populations think about the future of their rural localities. Putting the countryside at the centre of analysis the project pays attention to the social consequences of Brexit for different rural communities. It looks at the increasingly shared urban-rural experience of international migration and asks if it makes sense to 'ruralise' what have been more urban-associated ideas such as social cohesion and social inclusion.

Situating itself in community life in small rural towns in England, Wales, and Scotland this project offers a nationally sensitive, place-based investigation of changing rural social relations and the ways in which rural localities are being reshaped after Brexit.

This project collected survey and interview data to study Eurochildren, their families and their experience and responses to Brexit. The project aims to portray the emergence of a new politics of belonging, which reconfigures discursively and legally who belongs to a post-EU Britain. It also aims to establish a baseline for future research on migration and settlement decision making in families with EU27 nationals following the formal exit of the European Union.

The UK has been a member of the European Union for 40 years. Throughout that time there has been intermingling of people and institutions which can be most clearly seen in the growing number of bi- and mixed-nationality EU families in the UK and their children, many of whom born in the UK and holding a British passport. This is a growing, and yet understudied and underreported, segment of the British society. In a post-EU referendum context, where the rhetoric about curbing EU immigration has permeated political, media, and popular discourses, producing a stark 'us and them' narrative, the question left unasked and unanswered is what are the human and emotional costs of this abrupt geopolitical shift if 'us and them' are the same? Through the study of Eurochildren and their families and their experience and responses to Brexit, the project aims to portrait the emergence of a new politics of belonging which reconfigures discursively and legally who belong to a post-EU Britain and establish a baseline for future research on migration and settlement decision making in families with EU27 nationals following the formal exit of the European Union. In order to do so, it will: 1) Profile and map the population of UK- and EU-born children of EU nationals in the UK and examine, at the aggregate level, different types of EU families and measure their socio-economic inclusion into British society. 2) Investigate how families with at least one EU27 member experience and respond to the process of exiting from the European Union and identify factors that shape such responses. 3) Examine the impact of the EU referendum and its aftermath on different age cohorts of UK-born Eurochildren, examining in particular how they articulate their sense of belonging and attitudes vis-a-vis the UK and the EU. With a team comprising academic experts in the fields of migration and integration, third sector collaborators and legal experts, and using a mixed methods approach, this project provide an empirically-rich and in-depth account of how EU families, often including both UK and EU passport holders and members with dual citizenship, experience and plan to respond to Brexit, a baseline from which to further analyse the process family migration decision making following the formal exit from the EU. The project involves three interconnected work packages (WP). WP1, which is of a quantitative nature, will analyse historical Census and Live Birth data in order to profile and geographically map EU families and their children. Different configurations of EU families, based on their demographic, geographical, and inclusion circumstances, will be established via this data and will inform the qualitative work in WP2 and 3 and our analysis of legal and policy implications of Brexit on this population. In WP2 focus groups and in-depth interviews will be conducted with EU families, as well as reflexive research, in order to explore questions of belonging within the context of the exit from the EU. In WP3, interview with UK-born adult Eurochildren and EU-born parents of Eurochildren will be conducted in order to bring to the fore the ways in which children experience migration decision-making and belonging. This mixed methods study will generate ground-breaking new data on EU families and their EU and UK-born children in the UK, contributing to the strategic, political and policy responses of UK and EU policy makers and to a more informed public debate on the consequences of Brexit on UK and EU citizens alike. The project includes a strategy set to maximise dissemination and impact. This will be done via: producing robust, composite and promptly accessible evidence (journal articles, blogs, briefings, media and online materials); engaging from the outset with a wide network of researchers, policy makers and practitioners; and using tailored dissemination channels to reach out to relevant audiences.

There were over 15 million millennials in the United Kingdom in 2024. This generation, sometimes called Generation Y were born between 1981 and 1996 and are mainly the children of the post-war Baby Boomer generation. As of 2024, Millennials were the largest generational cohort in the UK, followed by Generation X at 14 million people, Gen Z at 13.6 million, and then the Baby Boomer generation at 13.4 million. The most numerous single-year of age for Millennials, and the UK as a whole, was 33 at over 976,000. Boomerang generation The first cohort of millennials came of age at the turn of the century and have almost certainly been heavily influenced by the growth of internet accessibility during this time. The economic challenges faced by this generation may have a relation to the increasing share of young adults who live with their parents in the UK. This has led to the perhaps unfair, characterization of millennials as the boomerang generation, who failed to grow-up and mature. Some of these negative stereotypes regarding Millennials have since shifted to the next youngest generation, Generation Z, who entered the workplace in the mid-2010s. Generation Remain One of the main challenges that British millennials currently face are their prospects after Brexit. Although the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, there were clear divisions between regions, classes and age-groups. Most millennials voted to remain in the Brexit referendum, with 73 percent of people aged 18 to 24, and 62 percent of those aged 25 to 34 voting to remain. As of October 2025, around a quarter of 25 to 49-year-olds intended to vote for the Labour Party, the same who would vote for the insurgent Reform Party, currently riding high in opinion polls. Millennials still appear to oppose Brexit, with approximately 69 percent of 25 to 49-year-olds believing Brexit to have been the wrong decision.

This chart illustrates the distribution of voting methods cast in the EU referendum in the Great Britain (GB) on ***************, by age. A noticeable share of people belonging to older age groups voted by post while the 45 to 54 year olds were the likeliest to vote in person.

In the Brexit referendum that took place on June 23, 206, approximately 74 percent of people with a degree voted to Remain in the European Union, compared with 26 percent who voted to Leave. Among those with no qualifications, 65 percent voted to Leave, and 35 percent to Remain.

Attitudes towards the European Union and towards digitization.

1. Attitudes towards the EU: more positive or more negative thoughts and feelings with regard to the EU; expectations for the future related to Germany and to the EU; expected positive or negative impact of a possible EU exit of Britain (Brexit) to the other EU Member States; assessment of the likelihood of the occurrence of selected consequences of a Brexit; role of the Federal Government at the European level (enforcement of national interests vs. reaching compromises between EU Member States).

2. Attitudes towards digitization: rather hopes or fears associated with digitization; strength of the changes in everyday life by digitization and evaluation of these changes; expected benefits due to digitization in various fields (transportation, medicine, schools and universities, the fight against crime, private communication, access to information from government and business, communication with public authorities as well as the purchase of products and services); desired influence of politics on digitization; assessment of political tasks related to digitization (creation of new Internet companies, promoting digital education in schools and for senior citizens, strengthening of data protection, expansion of fast Internet in urban and rural areas, uniform rules for the use of music and video files across Europe, protection against cyber crime and application of digital technology in health care); Opinion on the digitization of services and information in public authorities and institutions; personally used digital offers of the public service and satisfaction with these offers; opinion on the constant evolution of digital technology; opinion on digital education (as important as reading and writing, as many as possible digital services for seniors, digital education beginning in elementary school); satisfaction with the speed of Internet at home.

Demography: age; sex; highest educational degree; employment; occupational position; marital status; confession; income (groups); party preference (Sunday question).

Also encoded was: state; city size; weighting factor.

The 2019 European Election Study (EES) Voter Study is a post-election study, conducted in all 28 EU member states after the elections to the European Parliament were held between 23 and 26 May 2019. The main objective of the 2019 EES Voter study is to study electoral participation and voting behaviour in European Parliament elections, but more than that. It is also concerned with the evolution of an EU political community and a European public sphere, with citizens’ perceptions of and preferences about the EU political regime, with their evaluations of EU political performance, and the consequences of Brexit.

The survey was conducted by Gallup International. The data collection was mostly conducted online. The respondents were selected randomly from access panel databases using stratification variables, with the exception of Malta and Cyprus where a multi-stage Random Digit Dialing approach was used. In all countries, the samples were stratified by gender, age, region and type of locality. The sample size is roughly 1,000 interviews in each EU member state (except Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta where the sample size is 500). The total sample size is 26,538.

The questionnaire covers items on electoral behavior, such as questions on electoral participation and party choice at the EU and national level, party preferences, and propensity to support particular parties; general political attitudes; interest in politics; background characteristics such as gender, age, education, religion. Innovations in EES 2019 include batteries of questions about the consequences of Brexit and on liberal democratic attitudes.

This chart shows results from an online survey conducted in Great Britain in 2016 on whether Brexit supporters would still be in favor of Brexit if much of London's financial services industry moved to other EU countries, sorted by age group. According to the survey, people from older age groups were more likely to support Brexit in the given circumstances. By contrast, only ** percent of those in the youngest age group would support leaving the EU in such a scenario.

In the Brexit referendum that took place on June 23, 206, approximately 57 percent of people in upper middle-class professions voted to Remain compared with 43 percent who voted to Leave. Among those in lower-working class professions, 64 percent voted to leave, and 36 percent to Remain.

This statistic displays the number of citizens who were entitled to cast a vote during the EU referendum in the United Kingdom (UK) from June **** 2016, by region. The South East of England had approximately *** million eligible voters. At almost *** million people, London was the region with the second greatest number of eligible voters. Northern Ireland had the fewest, with just over **** million eligible voters.

This chart shows results from an online survey conducted in Great Britain in 2016 on whether Brexit supporters would still be in favor of Brexit if the unemployment rate in Britain rose significantly as a consequence, sorted by age group. Respondents from older age groups were more likely to support Brexit despite an increase in unemployment. By contrast, younger people were generally less supportive and unsure about their stance on Brexit in the given circumstances.

This chart shows results from an online survey conducted in Great Britain in 2016 on whether Brexit supporters would still be in favor of Brexit if British people needed a visa to travel elsewhere in Europe, sorted by age group. The most support for leaving the EU under these circumstances was found in the older age groups. By contrast, the most respondents who opposed the idea of Brexit were recorded to be in the youngest age group.